The War on Suffering

Spoiler: Suffering is winning.

Much like the way global terror attacks have been on a hyperbolic rise since “The War on Terror” was declared, The War on Suffering is creating more, not less suffering. Mental Health institutions and Big Pharma congratulate themselves and grow hideously rich while the population grows angrier, more alienated, depressed, paranoid, violent and just plain miserable than I have seen in my lifetime. The mission of the mental health industrial complex is ostensibly to alleviate mental anguish. Their prescription is lifetime doses of poison potions and pallets of pills promised to soothe the collective pain of humanity. Trust the Sienceiness!!

The result, in reality. has been an explosion of melancholia and suicide. (I know of more than one ten year old girl who has attempted suicide. This was unheard of before the War on Suffering was launched.)

A Tower of Babel has been built with bricks baked in broken minds and mortar made of lost souls. Babel can be understood as a super-spiritual structure. One in which scale stands in for meaning and hubris tramples humility.

The Crazy Cartel doubles down on their pharmaceutical interventions even as Babel falls and the piles of twisted and broken corpses are bulldozed into mass graves.

The goal is to numb every pain. Diagnose and pathologize human emotion. Every discomfort is treated as a nail to be hammered into submission. But when you medicalize the human condition, you don’t heal it, you teach people to mistrust their own pain, to exile meaning from experience.

From the body moving outward and upward, symptoms are not the enemy. They’re signals. The body isn’t betraying us, it’s identifying existential physical and spiritual attacks. Put the signal out and the fire is not extinguished, it grows into an inferno. The canary in our coal mine croaked a long time ago and we are taking deep Wim Hoff style breaths of the foul subterranean vapor as if it were elite Davos air.

Why is the story of Christ’s suffering so intolerable to the many of a modern mind?

Christ does not escape suffering, He voluntarily walks into it, fully conscious, fully innocent. He carries the weight of Being itself, unjustly, without resentment. The Cross is not an error to be corrected. It is the price of truth.

Christ’s suffering is not merely historical, it’s cosmic pattern. The sacrifice at the center of reality. Meaning is born not through comfort, but through properly oriented pain. The Cross stands as an eternal rebuke to the fantasy that salvation comes without cost.

So when a culture declares suffering meaningless, when it seeks to abolish it rather than integrate it, it doesn’t become compassionate. It becomes tyrannical. Because pain will always exist. And if you can’t give it meaning, you must suppress it or the people who feel it.

Pain is information. Suffering is initiation.

And a society that cannot tolerate either will eventually require coercion to maintain the illusion of comfort.

By bearing our crosses and thorns nobly, we walk the path towards transcendence.

The Crown of Thorns symbolizes suffering, mockery, and sacrifice. It represents both human cruelty and divine endurance. But thorns have other meanings. They protect plants, like roses or cacti, from predators.

Thorns point to hardship and the consequences of sin.

The juxtaposition of a beautiful rose with sharp thorns speaks to the duality of life, its pleasures and its pains.